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Web collab outfit Assemblage becomes Cisco's latest appendage

WebRTC for peasants, telepresence for suits

Cisco's vision for the enterprise might still be telepresence and $US1,500 Android tablets, but The Borg is at least prepared to consider that some people might want their collaboration to come as cheaply as possible.

To that end, the company has just bought WebRTC/HTML5 collaboration startup Assemblage, which pitches itself as enabling “simple, one-click browser-to-browser collaboration without the need for downloads, plugins or installation”.

The product set includes Assemblage's Kollaborate, a download-free high-definition meeting platform which offers paid users password-protection of meetings ($US9.99 per month), or at $US29.99 per month, meeting archives, scheduling and team management.

Other Assemblage products include presentation sharing to mobile and screen share apps.

“Assemblage’s technology also integrates with popular third party cloud services and supports 40 different file types to enable quick and efficient collaboration,” Cisco's Hilton Romanski says in this blog post.

Cisco says the technology will be “integrated into Cisco's next-generation collaboration platform”, as part of its Collaboration Technology Group.

Since The Borg doesn't generally let acquisitions become cannibals for its own children, The Register would expect its C-level collaboration and its beloved telepresence kit to get an even stronger “premium” positioning.

Assemblage has expressed the hope that under Cisco it will be able to "continue to provide users and businesses with world-class experiences within real-time collaboration". ®